BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A President, a Vacancy and Complications

By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

Published: December 8, 2000

PROTECT AND DEFEND

By Richard North Patterson

549 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.

Richard North Patterson's new political thriller about a battle over a Supreme Court nominee starts off like an episode of ''The West Wing'' and swiftly mutates into something more closely resembling ''Dynasty'' or ''Dallas.''

It stars a Kennedyesque president with an explosive secret in his past, a John McCain-esque senator with an equally explosive family secret, and a Supreme Court nominee with a secret daughter.

The novel begins with the death of the chief justice of the United States and ends with the death of a young woman caught up in the political machinations of her elders. Its plot turns out to be even more implausible than the drama now playing out on cable news networks, and a good deal less compelling.

The president in ''Protect and Defend'' is one Kerry Kilcannon, ''the best intuitive politician'' in recent memory, as one observer puts it, a man who rose to national prominence after his brother, ''a freshly minted Irish-American prince,'' was assassinated. Kilcannon -- who was also the hero of Mr. Patterson's 1998 novel, ''No Safe Place'' -- is depicted as part bleeding-heart liberal and part Dirty Harry. We are repeatedly asked to admire his unique blend of idealism (even when it leads him to make reckless political judgments) and ruthlessness (even when it leads him to use the F.B.I. to intimidate reporters). In Kilcannon's case, the ends are always supposed to justify the means.

Although Kilcannon is described as being as manipulative and unsentimental as any of his rivals, Mr. Patterson adds that ''Kerry needed a larger cause than power,'' namely, ''the belief that he was bettering the future of those who relied on him, and of a country he deeply loved, whose ideals had helped raise Kerry himself, the son of immigrants, to become its leader.'' The story Mr. Patterson proceeds to tell is at once naive about the ways of Washington and melodramatic in the extreme.

Within days of being sworn in as president, Kilcannon decides to nominate a judge named Caroline Masters to fill the newly vacant seat on the Supreme Court. He is not content to make her an associate justice, but wants her to be the new chief; he figures that Masters, as a Democrat and feminist, will tip the balance between liberals and conservatives on the court.

Despite the confirmation problems suffered by the Supreme Court and cabinet nominees of earlier administrations, Kilcannon barely considers anyone else for the job. He plans to enlist the help of his friend Chad Palmer -- a maverick Republican senator who once spent two years as a hostage in Afghanistan -- to get her nomination confirmed, using as leverage Palmer's determination to pass campaign finance reform.

Never mind that Masters confides that she had a child out of wedlock years ago and has since identified that daughter in F.B.I. documents as her niece, opening herself to charges of perjury. Never mind that Kilcannon is staking his fledgling administration's reputation on a controversial nomination that will polarize Congress and the country at large. Never mind that his chief of staff warns him that the ''moral -- and practical -- thing to do is to preserve your political capital for things like health care, gun control, campaign reform and saving social security.''

As for Masters, she proves to be just as willful as Kilcannon. While waiting for the confirmation process to proceed, she becomes embroiled in a wildly publicized case before the California Court of Appeals involving a 15-year-old named Mary Ann Tierney, who wants to undergo a late-term abortion in defiance of the wishes of her ardently anti-abortion parents.

Although Masters could easily recuse herself from the case -- and probably should, given that the girl's lawyer happens to be the judge's former law clerk -- she makes no effort to do so. In fact she goes on to write the majority opinion, affirming Mary Ann's right to abort her fetus. That decision further inflames the wrath of the anti-abortion movement and further imperils Masters's confirmation in the Senate.

Mr. Patterson -- who has worked as a lawyer in San Francisco and written several legal thrillers -- does a more capable job orchestrating the courtroom drama in ''Protect and Defend'' than he does with the political aspects of his story. He delineates the maneuverings of lawyers and witnesses with assurance while briskly sketching in the arguments surrounding late-term abortions and parental consent laws.

His ideological sympathies, however, are so baldly apparent that they undermine his story's credibility and result in flat, cartoony characters. Mary Ann Tierney is depicted as a sweet, anguished victim; her father as a cruel tyrant, willing to call his daughter a would-be murderer in court; and Mary Ann's lawyer as a smart, high-minded defender of the powerless.

Mr. Patterson also stacks the deck against Kilcannon's political rivals. His chief adversary, Macdonald Gage, the Republican majority leader, is described as a man with ''the soul of a Russian apparatchik, who cloaked his endless machinations beneath a string of pious bromides,'' and he emerges as a self-serving operator in thrall to an evil lobbyist named Mason Taylor, who uses private detectives and blackmail to promote his far-right agenda of anti-abortion, anti-reform politics.

The only remotely complex -- and interesting -- characters in ''Protect and Defend'' are the president's chief of staff, Clayton Slade, whose advice the president studiously ignores, and Chad Palmer, a Republican senator whom the president uses and betrays in the course of achieving his goals. Because these two characters act out of a mix of ambition, principle and insider savvy, they help engage the reader's attention. But even they cannot save this novel from reading like a contrived soap opera with a political agenda, a soap opera that is not even ready for the prime-time news.